For the volunteers at Mama’s Kitchen, delivering food to San Diegans living with AIDS has always meant delivering hope and comfort along with soup and sandwiches. When John Crepeau began volunteering there 22 years ago, it also meant dealing with some emotional baggage that too many people had been lugging around for way too long.

“It gave me a sense that I was doing a little bit of something at a time when there was so much fear and discouragement,” the 68-year-old Crepeau said earlier this week. “We don’t just deliver food. We smile and show we care. That is part of why I got involved — to feel that I was doing something positive.”

Founded in 1990 by Laurie Leonard, who had lost her brother to AIDS, Mama’s Kitchen now delivers three meals a day to more than 1,300 local men, women and children who are living with AIDS or cancer. The nonprofit group that spent many years operating out of restaurants, storefronts and church basements now commandeers an 11,000-square foot building on the edge of City Heights, where some 800 volunteers cook and pack meals that drivers like Crepeau deliver to clients all over the county.

Except there aren’t too many volunteers exactly like John Crepeau. He has been with Mama’s Kitchen from the beginning, when the group was small and the challenges of the AIDS crisis and the stigmas attached to the virulent disease were very, very big.

“John has been here since the early days, which was a very different time,” said Executive Director Alberto Cortés, as he watched drivers swing by to pick up their meals. “The folks we were serving were at the end of their lives. Oftentimes they were isolated, alienated and disenfranchised from their families and friends. The volunteers who stepped up then were people who cared without judgment and who understood they could make a difference in people’s lives by working with this organization.”

When he moved to San Diego in the summer of 1990, Crepeau was a Catholic priest on a leave of absence from his Michigan-based parish. A few months later, he answered an ad for a fledgling organization looking for volunteers to deliver food to people living with AIDS. In the fall of 1990, Mama’s Kitchen was born, and the priest found a new mission.

“We didn’t have the (drug) cocktails and the medications back then to cut down on both the transmission and the death rate. When I started, we would have a client for a month or two, and that was all. They weren’t living much longer,” Crepeau said. “I knew people who were sick and I had lost some friends, and there was this real need that was not being met. I went to that first meeting to see what it was all about, and 22 years later, here I am.”